In the news
■ Surya Kapu, a 13-yearold from South Jordan, Utah, won a rare reinstatement to the Scripps National Spelling Bee field after appealing that he was denied relevant root information about the word “leucovorin,” a medicine that counteracts the side effects of a cancer drug.
■ Marisa Bezjian, a veterinarian at Zoo Miami, managed to fix up “Baymax,” a 50-year-old, 388-pound loggerhead turtle whose left fin was destroyed in a shark attack, and the turtle is now rehabbing at the Sea Turtle Hospital.
■ Kay Ivey, governor of Alabama, noted “we were able to put the bad guy behind bars where he belongs” as she authorized payment of a $5,000 reward to the anonymous person whose tip helped the state capture an inmate who sparked a nationwide manhunt after escaping with a jail official.
■ Rhondalyn Randolph of the NAACP in Owensboro, Ky., said the aim was not to erase history but “to promote truth for how things actually happened without romanticizing” as a Confederate statue that stood outside the courthouse for more than a century was removed with little fanfare in the wake of litigation.
■ Charles Booker, who is challenging Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, wears a noose in a campaign ad in which he seeks to highlight the nation’s painful history of lynching and Paul’s opposition to a bill to make it a federal hate crime.
■ Maren Morris, a country music star, urges her contemporaries to call on others to follow suit as the CMA Fest prohibits Confederate flag imagery at its Nashville, Tenn., event, saying the decision aims to keep fans safe and prevent discrimination.
■ Sharon Roberts, CFO of the Bibb County, Ga., school system, said “we’ve just been kind of kicking it down the road these last couple of years,” but covid-19 relief money is running out and declining enrollment means schools will have to be closed, with 14 elementaries in danger statewide.
■ Merrick Garland, the nation’s attorney general, told Harvard graduates “our hearts are broken” and that their generation has been called upon to show “an impossible kind of resilience” after another mass shooting at a school, this time in Uvalde, Texas.
■ Dmitri Muratov, the Russian journalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize and donated his prize money to charity, is now auctioning off the 23-karat gold medal itself, with the proceeds going to UNICEF to help children who are refugees from Ukraine.